Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Netlist Inc. (2nd nomination)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus. The way the discussion has gone after Cunard's sources is pretty split. King of &hearts;   &diams;   &clubs;  &spades; 01:12, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

Netlist Inc.
AfDs for this article: 
 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

This was kept in 2011. I think our standards for notability of ompanies has increased--the present article is just a directory listing  DGG ( talk ) 01:38, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Companies-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 03:09, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 03:09, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

*Keep per 1Wiki8. Hang googles (talk) 10:40, 17 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep - was notable back in 2011, is notable now in 2016. Will be notable in 2017, no matter if it is active, acquired, or defunct.   Nominators attempt to selectively dismiss established notability guidelines is noted.  --  1Wiki8 ........................... (talk) 19:46, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete as I've been watching this and I'll concur with the nomination we have certainly changed since 2011, especially with aspects of advertising and the damages of accepting or even considering accepting it now, thus as always, an AfD in 2011, especially about a company in which exists for advertising today, is unconvincing and suggesting we keep it for "hopeful improvements or later" is clearly WP:CRYSTAL and also then violating policy WP:NOT, therefore it's non-negotiable policy. When it's clear the 2011 comments themselves consisted of "Let's keep it" or "Sure, it's acceptable", that's self-explanatory. SwisterTwister   talk  19:57, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
 * This overuse of WP:NOT reminds one of the boy who cried wolf.  SwisterTwister has misused WP:NOT so many times in the past, and this is yet another case of misuse, and disruption on their part.  --  1Wiki8 ........................... (talk) 20:02, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
 * A stopped clock is right twice per day, and this seems to be one of those occasions. 86.17.222.157 (talk) 20:12, 17 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Please, in your own words, show how this is a convincing article in the eyes of policy WP:NOT, since this is the policy the nomination has; also, there's the AfD guide WP:Clearly notable. SwisterTwister   talk  18:47, 17 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Please, stop badgering people at AFD. It is disruptive.  --  1Wiki8 ........................... (talk) 13:10, 18 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Keep the company is notable, although article needs work. I also would suggest merge with HyperCloud Memory, which appears to just be a brand name used by that company. Perhaps not a very high-profile company since they design stuff deep in the bowels of computers, but should be able to dig up independent sources, and public company documents should be reliable. W Nowicki (talk) 19:15, 17 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete. We need to apply some kind of common sense to our coverage of companies rather than just go by whether some routine coverage of them happens to be available via Google. That common sense tells me that a company with "more than 110" (which strongly implies fewer than 120) employees and an annual revenue of $8 million is not notable. I would also suggest deleting HyperCloud Memory, which, as a product of such a small company, is even less notable. 86.17.222.157 (talk) 20:12, 17 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete Not adhere to Wiki Standards. It is a public company, got news on search but wiki is not Public Listed company directory. So agree with DGG on this one. Light2021 (talk) 18:24, 18 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Oh yes, Wikipedia is not a company directory, but that mostly makes me object to the undue emphasis on the most recent revenue as indicated in the infobox. These details quickly get out of date. The notability comes from the total amount of coverage over the whole life of the company, not just the most recent year. In particular, On a quick check I see that revenues were more like $150 million during 2006, and it had many more employees, for example before the recession. The coverage is more in trade press than popular media (which prefer the "two kids and an app" company). But there is enough coverage for notability. See EE Times, "The Register", etc. There are also patent lawsuits that got some coverage vs SanDisk and one in 2015 with Diablo, and others see   etc.  W Nowicki (talk) 00:10, 19 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Looking at the articles objectively, there is not really much to salvage. So if I do not make the case for keep, a compromise would be to delete both this one and HyperCloud Memory and then develop a new one with some independent sources that gives a more historical context instead of just a snapshot litany of product acronyms. The company story is worth telling, but this article I agree is far from the minimum. W Nowicki (talk) 18:06, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus. Relisting comment: Sock vote stricken, AfD is mentioned in a current discussion, thus relisted Black Kite (talk) 00:54, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Black Kite (talk) 00:54, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Keep per the significant coverage in reliable sources. Notability (organizations and companies) says (my bolding): "There has been considerable discussion over time whether publicly traded corporations, or at least publicly traded corporations listed on major stock exchanges such as the NYSE and other comparable international stock exchanges, are inherently notable. Consensus has been that notability is not automatic in this (or any other) case. However, sufficient independent sources almost always exist for such companies, so that notability can be established using the primary criterion discussed above. Examples of such sources include independent press coverage and analyst reports. Accordingly, article authors should make sure to seek out such coverage and add references to such articles to properly establish notability. Editors coming across an article on such a company without such references are encouraged to search (or request that others search) prior to nominating for deletion, given the very high (but not certain) likelihood that a publicly traded company is actually notable according to the primary criterion."  The article notes: "Netlist, a publicly traded company based in Irvine, California that was founded in 2000 and that you have probably never heard of, will probably make a big splash at the SC09 supercomputing trade show next week. Netlist, which makes memory modules on an OEM basis for various companies, said Wednesday that in December it will roll out a virtualized, dense memory DDR3 module that will be able to trick servers into having more main memory than they are supposed to. ... Netlist got its start in 2000 doing custom printed circuit board design, and a 'netlist,' according to Paul Duran, director of business development at the company, is akin to a bill of materials for all of the connectivity on a PCB. A few years back, when dense rack and blade servers started going volume, Netlist became a specialist in making very low profile memory on an OEM basis for blade server makers. (The company does not disclose who its customers are, but they're probably the usual suspects.) The company also developed a memory packaging technology called Planar-X, which allows for two PCBs loaded with memory chips to be packaged together relatively inexpensively to share a single memory slot. This technique is cheaper and more reliable, according to Duran, than some of the dual-die packaging techniques memory module makers use to make dense memory cards out of low density and cheaper memory chips."  The article notes: "Right about now, server memory module maker Netlist is probably wishing that it hadn't already gone public. But if the enthusiasm in a new public offering by investors on Wall Street last Friday is any indication, Netlist may be onto something with its new HyperCloud DDR3 super-dense main memory for servers. ... Netlist is not particularly large or profitable at this point in its history, but it has what sounds like a good idea, and so the company hired Needham & Company to put together a public offering of three million of its shares to raise some cash to put HyperCloud memory into production and market it. ... Netlist has a market capitalization of $79.2m at time of writing. The real wonder is not why Netlist - which has a knack for choppy revenues and losses, as many startups do - was able to get money out of Wall Street. It is why one of the big server makers - Intel, or Advanced Micro Devices, all of which have a huge stake in server virtualization and will have to make up some revenue declines and margins if server virtualization eventually causes footprints to contract - hasn't snapped up Netlist already."  The article notes: "Netlist Inc. said it has raised about $15.4 million from a common stock offering of 4 million shares priced at $3.85 each. After commissions and other expenses, the offering will leave Netlist with $14.12 million in proceeds. The company will use that money for operations, including marketing, research and development, working capital and other general corporate purposes. ... Netlist makes memory subsystems for servers and high-performance computers and communications equipment."  The article notes: Irvine's Netlist is trying to carve out a niche in this battleground by creating specialized memory packages for the likes of Dell and IBM and their high-end corporate computers. Since opening in 2000, Netlist has lost a total of $20 million cracking into the computing world after initially focusing on the telecommunications industry. Memory's high end is a crowded place, too. Netlist competes with, among others, O.C. shops SimpleTech and Viking.  Netlist's gambit may be paying off, as the company is at least profitable in its most recent six-month period. And sales are up 80 percent.  <li> The article notes: "Shareholders who bought Netlist's first public shares for $7 each in December are taking the company to court as the shares drop to nearly $3. The suits accuse the Irvine-based maker of computer memory equipment and its officers of violating federal securities laws by not revealing its vulnerability to a declining computer-memory market at the time of its initial public offering. ... In its IPO, 146-employee Netlist raised $39.5 million, net after $4.2 million in underwriting expenses, by selling 6.25 million shares at $7 each. The stock closed Thursday at $3.17."</li> <li> The article notes: Netlist Inc. will sell $15 million in common stock, the Irvine-based storage equipment maker said today. It plans to use proceeds to accelerate its patent monetization strategy, commercialize its HybriDIMM product line, and for general corporate purposes. ... The Business Journal in February reported that Netlist would receive $23 million from South Korea-based Samsung Electronics Co. and have access to thousands of patents from the world’s largest electronics company as part of a joint venture to co-develop a product combining Netlist’s HyperVault offering with Samsung’s DRAM and NAND memory technology. </li> <li> The article notes: "Flash DIMM technology developer Netlist has signed a five-year joint development deal with global memory leader Samsung to produce non-volatile DIMMs, giving it a lifeline from years of litigation hell against Diablo Technologies over memory channel storage IP. The basic concept is to put flash chips on DDR3 and 4 memory DIMMS, thus giving the flash memory channel access, which has lower latency than PCIe flash cards. Netlist and Diablo Technologies worked together on this and then separated, Diablo licensing the resulting Memory Channel Storage to SMART Storage. ... Business results for Netlist have been poor. Revenues for its third 2015 quarter were a slim $1.6m, compared to $4.8m a year go. There was a $5.4m net loss; it was $4.1m a year ago. Ho hum, you think, this company is really struggling. Step forward Sammy in white knight guise, with a gift of $8m cash from Samsung Electronics and a $15m investment in Netlist from Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. That $23m will come in very handy indeed. Netlist and Samsung intend to sample NVDIMM product to select customers in 2016."</li> <li>Netlist is a publicly traded corporation. According to Notability (organizations and companies): "sufficient independent sources almost always exist for such companies, so that notability can be established using the primary criterion discussed above. Examples of such sources include independent press coverage and analyst reports." https://www.zacks.com/stock/research/NLST/brokerage-reports WebCite lists several analyst reports about Netlist. </li> <li>Morningstar, Inc. also has an analyst report under a paywall at http://www.morningstar.com/stocks/XNAS/NLST/quote.html.</li> </ol>There is sufficient coverage in reliable sources to allow Netlist to pass Notability, which requires "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". Cunard (talk) 09:09, 27 December 2016 (UTC) </li></ul>
 * Keep The size and role of the company, combined with the sources provided in the article and available elsewhere to be added all meet the notability standard. Alansohn (talk) 15:47, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Which policy states that any sources and the size is enough for a policy-based article? GNG is a guideline and is considered as such, but WP:NOT is not. SwisterTwister   talk  04:41, 30 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Keep Most of the sources listed by Cunard above are clearly sufficiently independent and reliable to establish notability.--greenrd (talk) 23:10, 29 December 2016 (UTC)
 * How is that an explicit policy-based vote? Simply "It's sourced" is not policy. SwisterTwister   talk  04:41, 30 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Keep In addition to the coverage found by Cunard, this article covers a pending patent infringement lawsuit that suggests the company could be awarded USD$1B []. Not to violate WP:BALL, but the CURRENT media coverage of the suit puts them over the top in terms of notability.  I do agree with W Nowicki to consider possibly redirecting the HyperCloud Memory article into this one, with an enhanced product section.  Much of the info that User:DGG deleted can be restored if written properly and in a non-promotional way.Timtempleton (talk) 00:02, 30 December 2016 (UTC)
 * 1/a pending lawsuit that may never take place is in fact WP:CRYSTAL. These sorts of lawsuits are routine, and the possible high payout is rare--it it were to happen, it might be a reason for including in the article, or even including the article. But WP is not a Annual Report.

the items cited above are in my view routine notices, not substantial coverage. Brokerage reports are irrelevant, because they indiscriminately cover all public companies. And the product descriptions I removed would be inappropriate in any article, even as a bare list. WP is NOT A CATALOG. DGG ( talk ) 04:15, 30 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment and analysis' The following shows the sources here are not in fact independent or substantial coverage:
 * "Netlist Inc. will sell $15 million in common stock, the Irvine-based storage equipment maker said today. It plans to use proceeds to accelerate....It plans to get funding...."
 * [Specific finances and numbers]....Step forward Sammy in white knight guise, with a gift of $8m cash from Samsung Electronics and a $15m investment in Netlist from Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. That $23m will come in very handy indeed. Netlist and Samsung intend to sample NVDIMM product to select customers in 2016"
 * "Flash DIMM technology developer Netlist has signed a five-year joint development deal with global memory leader Samsung to produce non-volatile DIMMs, giving it a lifeline"
 * "Irvine's Netlist is trying to carve out a niche in this battleground by creating specialized memory packages for the likes of Dell and IBM and their high-end corporate computers....Now here are their profits"
 * "Netlist Inc. said it has raised about $15.4 million from a common stock offering of 4 million shares priced at $3.85 each....Here are the financials and what they make...."
 * "Netlist, a publicly traded company based in Irvine, California that was founded in 2000 and that you have probably never heard of, will probably make a big splash at the SC09 supercomputing trade show next week....Here is what the company's business involves....Here are the company's services and what it offers"
 * Notice the sheer blatancy and consistency how it always focuses with exactly primary-company words, no meaningful and genuinely honored journalist would ever put that, and it's not surprising that then examining these finds a blatant number of "From the company", "The company says", "The company published today", etc. None of that is independent and explicitly was republished by local areas for local clients.


 * The Orange County Register is simply that, a localized and local-focused business column for everyday business activities, it's not independent since it's simply a local business journal, journals of which are blatantly known for republishing anything for companies.
 * When we start as an encyclopedia, we explicitly laid the basic policies and one of them was WP:NOT, a serious policy that showed we were not going to advertise and, regardless of whatever it involved, we were a free encyclopedia and accepting advertising damns it, and it shows we can't even form an NPOV encyclopedia. There hasn't been a single user who has substantially improved this in the 6+ years it has existed, only company SPAs have and that says enough there. Even notice how here shows the article's current sources themselves are literally nothing but sheer listings and notices. As DGG noted above, the sources and contents are all what you'd find a catalog, complete with the above list's "Here's the company pricing and finances". SwisterTwister   talk  04:41, 30 December 2016 (UTC)
 * From the above, the fact of "sufficient independent sources almost always exist for such companies" is not a guaranteed and itself is not policy, so the sentence "It may be notable" is not in fact saying we will unmistakably accept it by sourcing alone. Never before have we as a competent encyclopedia acceptably said "Hey, who cares if it's unimprovable, let's keep it anyway!"


 * Comment to closer - One of the concerns in this AfD has been not only the unfortunate consistency in not actually analyzing the votes but not even then acknowledging the actual contents in the sources above as I have now, we cannot blindly say "It must be notable" without actually weighing the concerns at the same time, especially when it's the encyclopedia's fate in the balance here and accepting advertising, any costs of it, is damaging to us. Examining our general notability for companies, it explicitly shows that local expected coverage is not a policy for automatically giving the company notability, and the fact every single source shown above is a local business journal, which completely shows all the company's attention is local and only that. there's no national or otherwise major news publishers here, and the fact the article is full of it, it shows it. Simply consider the history here starting at December 7, and how advertising was explicitly removed until an SPA came and contributed, it shows we cannot tolerate any such company PR and once we've attempted improvements but they won't last, it shows this cannot be kept as such unchanging PR. We have a choice to either accept advertising and let it damage WP until we're a PRWeb or PRBusinessWire website, but we shouldn't because that's what the first pillar of Wikipedia was: An Encycloepdia. SwisterTwister   talk  04:41, 30 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete -- the only thing the company has going for it is being WP:LISTED but at $8M of revenue it's so insignificant as to not register on the tech radar. The sources presented is very unconvincing, with The Register being known for pretty much publishing anything a tech company tells it, and The Orange County Register being routine local coverage. The article's content belongs on the company web site, not in the encyclopedia. K.e.coffman (talk) 04:56, 30 December 2016 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.